Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Monday, April 27, 2015
Sunday, April 26, 2015
Die Hard (1988), Die Hard 2: Die Harder (1990), Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), Live Free or Die Hard (2007), A Good Day to Die Hard (2013)
Despite Die Hard being one of my dad's favorite movies (if he stumbled upon it on TV he'd probably stay and watch it) I'd never seen it in its entirety, though I'd seen parts of it many times. Die Hard is really the platonic ideal of an action movie, as well as the template for many an imitator. New York cop John McClane (iconicly Bruce Willis) travels to Los Angeles to visit his estranged corporate exec wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) and children for Christmas. John is to meet Holly at her companies Christmas party, held around 30 stories up in the new Nakatomi Tower. While John is waiting in his wife's office the building is taken over by a group of West German terrorists headed by one Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman). McClane manages to escape to an upper story and tries to signal the police, he eventually gets in contact with a sympathetic officer played by the future dad from Family Matters Reginald VelJohnson.
Gruber's group quickly becomes aware that someone is upstairs and send men after McClane (at the time not realizing that they have his wife among their hostages). McClane takes out the men sent after him and starts a cat and mouse game with Gruber and his group, more police officers eventually arrive and McClane tries to end the standoff. It turns out that the supposed 'terrorist' group are really sell outs who have taken the tower so they can break into a highly secure volt holding hundreds of millions of dollars of bonds, this will become a theme in the later Die Hard films were the bad guys pretty much do everything for money rather then ideology.
Everything seems to work in Die Hard , especially the performances, Willis plays a good 'every cop' stuck in an impossible situation who makes it work, and has some memorable one liners. The films source material is said to be the 1966 novel The Detective by Roderick Thorp, which was itself previously made into a successful movie of the same name with Frank Sinatra in 1968, but reading about both online there doesn't seem to be much connection to the final product here. However this will set a pattern followed by many of the later Die Hard films of deriving (apparently loosely) from source material that does not feature the John McClane character.
Die Hard is kind of a perfect movie, very enjoyable, and sets the stage for what would prove to be a very persistent movie franchise.
Die Hard: ****
The tremendous success of the original Die Hard yielded a sequel a mere two years later. Die Hard 2, sometimes given with a subtitle of Die Harder, takes the formula established by the first film and follows it very closely, even down to copying its Christmas setting. By the time of this film John and his wife are back together and he has even transferred to the Los Angeles Police Department to be near his wife. For Christmas John has taken the kids to DC to spend the holidays with his in-laws, as the film begins John just arrived at the airport to pick up his wife who has taken a later flight to join them. The perceptive John is the first to notice something amiss at the airport when he sees two guys sneak into the restricted baggage area, he follows them, there is a fight, one of the bad guys gets away and the other is killed. The airports chief of security Dennis Franz is furious at and skeptical of McClane, but John eventually manages to get the ear of the airports chief of operations, played by a pre-senatorial Fred Dalton Thompson.
There is another hostage situation in the works here, this one headed by a group of disgruntled U.S. military mean upset at their governments "betrayal" of a former allie, the anti-communist dictator of a fictional Latin American nation who is being brought to the United States to face charges relating to his side business in the illegal narcotics trade. The bad guys, headed by William Sadler as Colonel Stuart take remote control of tower operations and threaten to crash civilian planes unless a runway is cleared and a plane made available to take them and General Ramon Esperanza to safety once he arrives. To make their point the bad guys crash a plane captained by Colm Meaney after repealing an early attempt to stop them. With McClane's wife on a plane running increasing low on fuel John will do anything to stop the terrorists, pitting him again against the obvious bad guys as well as bureaucratic good guys on his own 'side'.
Die Hard 2 is basically a re-tread of the first Die Hard changing details like the setting and bad guy while making the scale bigger, yet remaining true to the essence and much of the formula of its predecessor. Thusly this Die Hard is not as good as the original, but its still good and very watchable. Subsequent Die Hard films would free themselves up more as regards formula constraints, but this movie is a great example of franchise films of the period and there extreme unwillingness to deviate much from their original entry, think Home Alone and Home Alone 2.
Die Hard 2: ***
Five years after the release of Die Hard 2 came Die Hard with a Vengeance, which like the first film was directed by expert action director (The Hunt for Red October, Last Action Hero) John McTiernan, (Die Hard 2 had been directed by the Finnish director Renny Harlin, who would go on to direct such films as Cliffhanger and The Long Kiss Goodnight). At this point John McClane has returned to NYC and the police department there, but his marriage to Holly (Bonnie Bedeila does not appear in this film but her voice can be briefly heard on a telephone) has again faltered and the two are in the process of getting a divorce. Said divorce has lead John to drinking and said drinking has endangered his position on the force, but things are about to change.
After "a department store is destroyed by a bomb during the morning commute" the police department "receive a call from a man calling himself "Simon", ordering them that suspended police officer Lt. John McClane be dropped in Harlem wearing a sandwich board that says "I hate niggers" and threatening to detonate another bomb if they don't comply. They collect McClane and follow Simon's instructions; McClane is saved from a potential attack by a group of young men by Zeus Carver, a nearby shop owner. McClane and Carver escape and return to headquarters, where Simon calls again and threatens to detonate more bombs if McClane and Carver do not follow his instructions." (quotes from Wikipedia).
Carver is played by Samuel L. Jackson and his character is not a big fan of white people, but the unlikely twosome is forced to work together in a series of increasingly outrageous scenarios (much like the Die Hard films would themselves become, a series of increasingly outrageous scenarios) including a race "to reach Wall Street station 90 blocks south, within 30 minutes to stop a bomb planted on a Brooklyn-bound 3 train" and filling containers with exact amounts of water to stop a bomb at a city park. In course of the film "Simon" is reveled to be "Simon Peter Gruber, the brother of Hans Gruber whom McClane killed in Nakatomi Towers 7 years before." Simon is played by Jeremy Irons, a great villainous actor on par with Alan Rickman in the first film. Anyway "Simon calls into the police again, knowing the FBI is there, and warns that he has planted another bomb in a public school somewhere in the city, and further it is rigged with a radio detonator that may be triggered by the police band. Simon tells them that he will get McClane and Carver the school's location if they continue to play his game. While McClane and Carver set off on Simon's next task, the police organize all the city's public works to begin searching schools, using 911 to coordinate activities." At this point were are still only about halfway through the movie, and there's a lot more action in it. (quotes again from Wikipedia)
Die Hard with a Vengeance is the film that proved that the John McClane franchise was capable of working without a rigid allegiance to the formula of the first two films. All we really want from McClane is for him to survive giant stunt pieces, have some sarcastic one liners and be forced to team-up with a reluctant partner, this later characteristic coming very much to four in the most recent three entries in the franchise. This Die Hard has everything you could want in an action movie, it doesn't really break new ground, but it does what it does quite well and is very enjoyable.
Die Hard with a Vengeance: ***
A dozen years would pass before the release of the next film in the Die Hard franchise, 2007's Live Free or Die Hard. Now I have read that at one point the studio had the idea of making a film that would feature both Bruce Willis's John McClane and Kiefer Sutherlands character of Jack Bauer working together. Now that could have been awesome, though it also could have been awful. I'm not sure how far that project got into pre-production but it wouldn't surprise me at all if either this film, or the next Die Hard film A Good Day to Die Hard grow directly out of it. Live Free or Die Hard has a particularly 24-esque plot, a disgruntled former government security analyst (played by Timothy Olyphant) recruits a group of cyber terrorists to bring down the nations electronic infrastructure because he is angry with the governments refusal to take his claims about its vulnerability seriously, but also (because this is a Die Hard film) to steal a bunch of financial information to make himself rich.
McClane, still a New York cop comes into the film when he is instructed to take a suspected hacker (Justin Long) in for questioning. Said hacker was not fully aware of what he was doing and was just being used by Olyphants terrorist group, so they try to kill him incase he gets wise, and luckily McClane is there to save him. Over the course of the film Willis and Long end up on the run together trying to stop the bad guys master plane, and John's estranged daughter Lucy (played here by the lovely Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is captured by the guys as leverage against McClane (hot daughter in trouble is a very 24-esque plot point). Both Maggie Q and (of all people) Kevin Smith also have roles in this film. Live Free or Die Hard features what may be the most over the top stunt sequence in any Die Hard film to date, namely a semi-truck versus fighter jet chase on a Maryland freeway.
Live Free or Die Hard is still a fun film to watch, in spite of or perhaps because of how really ridicules it is in places. The old action franchise is adapted well for the zeitgeist moment of 2007, one still scared of 9/11 style terrorist attacks but starting to become increasingly concerned about government surveillance.
Live Free or Die Hard: ***
I had almost forgotten about this most recent Die Hard film, 2013's A Good Day to Die Hard. This film has John McClane traveling to Russia to try and get his estranged son Jack (Jai Courtney) out of prison there. Well it turns out that Jack got himself arrested for a very specific reason, you see he is an American spy who got arrested as part of a plan to free a US intelligence asset there, one Yuri Komarov (Sebastian Koch). John of course interferes not knowing what's going on, then has a crash course in his son's secrete life and stays on to help when most everyone else Jack trusts gets killed. Of course Jack at first doesn't want his dad's help, which seems silly to me because he's got to know about the events of at least some of the previous Die Hard films. Anyway the two bicker and spar a lot at first, but they bond by the end and its actually fun seeing this father and son fight the bad guys together. The film sets its climax at the abandoned Ukrainian city of Chernobyl in a sequence that almost rivals the jet vs. semi fight from the previous film for ridiculousness. Still at this point the Die Hard franchise has wandered so far from it origins, and McClane become such a superman action hero caricature that things are finally wearing a little thin. Word is that Brue Willis would like to make one more Die Hard film and hopes that it will return in spirit closer to what the early films were an not what the latter films became, I hope he gets his wish, but truth be told no matter what they do with the Die Hard franchise next, I'll probably watch it, so long as Brue Willis is involved.
A Good Day to Die Hard: **1/2
Gruber's group quickly becomes aware that someone is upstairs and send men after McClane (at the time not realizing that they have his wife among their hostages). McClane takes out the men sent after him and starts a cat and mouse game with Gruber and his group, more police officers eventually arrive and McClane tries to end the standoff. It turns out that the supposed 'terrorist' group are really sell outs who have taken the tower so they can break into a highly secure volt holding hundreds of millions of dollars of bonds, this will become a theme in the later Die Hard films were the bad guys pretty much do everything for money rather then ideology.
Everything seems to work in Die Hard , especially the performances, Willis plays a good 'every cop' stuck in an impossible situation who makes it work, and has some memorable one liners. The films source material is said to be the 1966 novel The Detective by Roderick Thorp, which was itself previously made into a successful movie of the same name with Frank Sinatra in 1968, but reading about both online there doesn't seem to be much connection to the final product here. However this will set a pattern followed by many of the later Die Hard films of deriving (apparently loosely) from source material that does not feature the John McClane character.
Die Hard is kind of a perfect movie, very enjoyable, and sets the stage for what would prove to be a very persistent movie franchise.
Die Hard: ****
The tremendous success of the original Die Hard yielded a sequel a mere two years later. Die Hard 2, sometimes given with a subtitle of Die Harder, takes the formula established by the first film and follows it very closely, even down to copying its Christmas setting. By the time of this film John and his wife are back together and he has even transferred to the Los Angeles Police Department to be near his wife. For Christmas John has taken the kids to DC to spend the holidays with his in-laws, as the film begins John just arrived at the airport to pick up his wife who has taken a later flight to join them. The perceptive John is the first to notice something amiss at the airport when he sees two guys sneak into the restricted baggage area, he follows them, there is a fight, one of the bad guys gets away and the other is killed. The airports chief of security Dennis Franz is furious at and skeptical of McClane, but John eventually manages to get the ear of the airports chief of operations, played by a pre-senatorial Fred Dalton Thompson.
There is another hostage situation in the works here, this one headed by a group of disgruntled U.S. military mean upset at their governments "betrayal" of a former allie, the anti-communist dictator of a fictional Latin American nation who is being brought to the United States to face charges relating to his side business in the illegal narcotics trade. The bad guys, headed by William Sadler as Colonel Stuart take remote control of tower operations and threaten to crash civilian planes unless a runway is cleared and a plane made available to take them and General Ramon Esperanza to safety once he arrives. To make their point the bad guys crash a plane captained by Colm Meaney after repealing an early attempt to stop them. With McClane's wife on a plane running increasing low on fuel John will do anything to stop the terrorists, pitting him again against the obvious bad guys as well as bureaucratic good guys on his own 'side'.
Die Hard 2 is basically a re-tread of the first Die Hard changing details like the setting and bad guy while making the scale bigger, yet remaining true to the essence and much of the formula of its predecessor. Thusly this Die Hard is not as good as the original, but its still good and very watchable. Subsequent Die Hard films would free themselves up more as regards formula constraints, but this movie is a great example of franchise films of the period and there extreme unwillingness to deviate much from their original entry, think Home Alone and Home Alone 2.
Die Hard 2: ***
Five years after the release of Die Hard 2 came Die Hard with a Vengeance, which like the first film was directed by expert action director (The Hunt for Red October, Last Action Hero) John McTiernan, (Die Hard 2 had been directed by the Finnish director Renny Harlin, who would go on to direct such films as Cliffhanger and The Long Kiss Goodnight). At this point John McClane has returned to NYC and the police department there, but his marriage to Holly (Bonnie Bedeila does not appear in this film but her voice can be briefly heard on a telephone) has again faltered and the two are in the process of getting a divorce. Said divorce has lead John to drinking and said drinking has endangered his position on the force, but things are about to change.
After "a department store is destroyed by a bomb during the morning commute" the police department "receive a call from a man calling himself "Simon", ordering them that suspended police officer Lt. John McClane be dropped in Harlem wearing a sandwich board that says "I hate niggers" and threatening to detonate another bomb if they don't comply. They collect McClane and follow Simon's instructions; McClane is saved from a potential attack by a group of young men by Zeus Carver, a nearby shop owner. McClane and Carver escape and return to headquarters, where Simon calls again and threatens to detonate more bombs if McClane and Carver do not follow his instructions." (quotes from Wikipedia).
Carver is played by Samuel L. Jackson and his character is not a big fan of white people, but the unlikely twosome is forced to work together in a series of increasingly outrageous scenarios (much like the Die Hard films would themselves become, a series of increasingly outrageous scenarios) including a race "to reach Wall Street station 90 blocks south, within 30 minutes to stop a bomb planted on a Brooklyn-bound 3 train" and filling containers with exact amounts of water to stop a bomb at a city park. In course of the film "Simon" is reveled to be "Simon Peter Gruber, the brother of Hans Gruber whom McClane killed in Nakatomi Towers 7 years before." Simon is played by Jeremy Irons, a great villainous actor on par with Alan Rickman in the first film. Anyway "Simon calls into the police again, knowing the FBI is there, and warns that he has planted another bomb in a public school somewhere in the city, and further it is rigged with a radio detonator that may be triggered by the police band. Simon tells them that he will get McClane and Carver the school's location if they continue to play his game. While McClane and Carver set off on Simon's next task, the police organize all the city's public works to begin searching schools, using 911 to coordinate activities." At this point were are still only about halfway through the movie, and there's a lot more action in it. (quotes again from Wikipedia)
Die Hard with a Vengeance is the film that proved that the John McClane franchise was capable of working without a rigid allegiance to the formula of the first two films. All we really want from McClane is for him to survive giant stunt pieces, have some sarcastic one liners and be forced to team-up with a reluctant partner, this later characteristic coming very much to four in the most recent three entries in the franchise. This Die Hard has everything you could want in an action movie, it doesn't really break new ground, but it does what it does quite well and is very enjoyable.
Die Hard with a Vengeance: ***
A dozen years would pass before the release of the next film in the Die Hard franchise, 2007's Live Free or Die Hard. Now I have read that at one point the studio had the idea of making a film that would feature both Bruce Willis's John McClane and Kiefer Sutherlands character of Jack Bauer working together. Now that could have been awesome, though it also could have been awful. I'm not sure how far that project got into pre-production but it wouldn't surprise me at all if either this film, or the next Die Hard film A Good Day to Die Hard grow directly out of it. Live Free or Die Hard has a particularly 24-esque plot, a disgruntled former government security analyst (played by Timothy Olyphant) recruits a group of cyber terrorists to bring down the nations electronic infrastructure because he is angry with the governments refusal to take his claims about its vulnerability seriously, but also (because this is a Die Hard film) to steal a bunch of financial information to make himself rich.
McClane, still a New York cop comes into the film when he is instructed to take a suspected hacker (Justin Long) in for questioning. Said hacker was not fully aware of what he was doing and was just being used by Olyphants terrorist group, so they try to kill him incase he gets wise, and luckily McClane is there to save him. Over the course of the film Willis and Long end up on the run together trying to stop the bad guys master plane, and John's estranged daughter Lucy (played here by the lovely Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is captured by the guys as leverage against McClane (hot daughter in trouble is a very 24-esque plot point). Both Maggie Q and (of all people) Kevin Smith also have roles in this film. Live Free or Die Hard features what may be the most over the top stunt sequence in any Die Hard film to date, namely a semi-truck versus fighter jet chase on a Maryland freeway.
Live Free or Die Hard is still a fun film to watch, in spite of or perhaps because of how really ridicules it is in places. The old action franchise is adapted well for the zeitgeist moment of 2007, one still scared of 9/11 style terrorist attacks but starting to become increasingly concerned about government surveillance.
Live Free or Die Hard: ***
I had almost forgotten about this most recent Die Hard film, 2013's A Good Day to Die Hard. This film has John McClane traveling to Russia to try and get his estranged son Jack (Jai Courtney) out of prison there. Well it turns out that Jack got himself arrested for a very specific reason, you see he is an American spy who got arrested as part of a plan to free a US intelligence asset there, one Yuri Komarov (Sebastian Koch). John of course interferes not knowing what's going on, then has a crash course in his son's secrete life and stays on to help when most everyone else Jack trusts gets killed. Of course Jack at first doesn't want his dad's help, which seems silly to me because he's got to know about the events of at least some of the previous Die Hard films. Anyway the two bicker and spar a lot at first, but they bond by the end and its actually fun seeing this father and son fight the bad guys together. The film sets its climax at the abandoned Ukrainian city of Chernobyl in a sequence that almost rivals the jet vs. semi fight from the previous film for ridiculousness. Still at this point the Die Hard franchise has wandered so far from it origins, and McClane become such a superman action hero caricature that things are finally wearing a little thin. Word is that Brue Willis would like to make one more Die Hard film and hopes that it will return in spirit closer to what the early films were an not what the latter films became, I hope he gets his wish, but truth be told no matter what they do with the Die Hard franchise next, I'll probably watch it, so long as Brue Willis is involved.
A Good Day to Die Hard: **1/2
Thursday, April 23, 2015
Child 44 (2015)
Child 44 is based on the best selling 2008 novel of the same name by English writer Tom Rob Smith. It in turn is inspired by Soviet serial killer Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo who was responsible for the sexual assault, mutilation and murder of 52 woman and children between 1978 and 1990. The story of Child 44 backs dates events however to the immediate post World War II period, with the bulk of the story set shortly after Stalin's deaths in 1953. Ironically the serial killer here is really not that interesting a character himself, he's not given enough screen time or development to become one, he's mostly just a distant monster, we don't even see his face until half way through the movie. The real subject of the story is how the ideological rigidity of the Soviet system complicates bringing the killer to justice. Stalin had apparently claimed publically that murder was a product of the capitalist system and that the crime was simply impossible in the 'paradise' of the Soviet state.
It is largely for that reason that authorities in this movie refuse to see what is right in front of them, that they have a serial killer on the lose. Nobody in a position to do something about this wants to be seen as questioning state dogma and so they turn a blind eye, pass the deaths off as an unfortunate string of accidents, until our protagonist Leo Demidov ( Tom Hardy) a Ukrainian orphan adopted by a prominent family in the 1930's, is unjustly demoted and sent to the sticks for little more then 'thought crime'. With little to lose Leo, his wife Raisa (Noomi Rapace) and a little later a reluctant general played by Gary Oldman, mount there own investigation, with Leo's old rival Vasili Nikitin (Joel Kinnaman) out to subvert them at every turn. All the substance is there, and the actors are good, but for some reason the movie just feels flat, it lacks a certain spark of life to bring it all together, I don't know if its the direction or the screenplay or what but the movies just too often dull and it really shouldn't have been. I know the ending was suppose to be poignant, and maybe it is in the book, but I just wasn't moved by anything in this film, and so it just wasn't powerful like it insists it is. It's watchable, and its got the Soviet look down, but I just can't be enthusiastic about it, and I really wanted to be. **1/2.
It is largely for that reason that authorities in this movie refuse to see what is right in front of them, that they have a serial killer on the lose. Nobody in a position to do something about this wants to be seen as questioning state dogma and so they turn a blind eye, pass the deaths off as an unfortunate string of accidents, until our protagonist Leo Demidov ( Tom Hardy) a Ukrainian orphan adopted by a prominent family in the 1930's, is unjustly demoted and sent to the sticks for little more then 'thought crime'. With little to lose Leo, his wife Raisa (Noomi Rapace) and a little later a reluctant general played by Gary Oldman, mount there own investigation, with Leo's old rival Vasili Nikitin (Joel Kinnaman) out to subvert them at every turn. All the substance is there, and the actors are good, but for some reason the movie just feels flat, it lacks a certain spark of life to bring it all together, I don't know if its the direction or the screenplay or what but the movies just too often dull and it really shouldn't have been. I know the ending was suppose to be poignant, and maybe it is in the book, but I just wasn't moved by anything in this film, and so it just wasn't powerful like it insists it is. It's watchable, and its got the Soviet look down, but I just can't be enthusiastic about it, and I really wanted to be. **1/2.
Young Adam (2003)
Young Adam is a British drama based on the 1954 novel of the same name by Alexander Trocchi. Set in 1950's Scotland the story concerns Joe Taylor (Ewan McGregor) a one time aspiring novelist who is now just kind of bumming around working odd jobs at docks and on barges. Joe is kind of a bastard, there are really only four female characters in this film, and Joe sleeps with all four of them, including the wife (Tilda Swinton) of his employer (Peter Mullan) and an ex girlfriend (Emily Mortimer) who he gets pregnant and later inadvertently causes to drown. Joe Taylor is not a likable guy, but he's not all that unlikable either, he's just kind of there, a hallow man an anti-hero, and this film follows him around as he indecisively broods, and turns out that's enough to make this movie good if not great. The performances are restrained and understated much like the gray, dirty and damp landscape of the Scottish docks and canals were most of the movie takes place. The structure of the film is very literary, it jumps back and forth through time and its not always clear the order events are happening in until near the end, and then its one of those 'oh my God, now it makes sense moments'. Not for everybody, even I didn't really 'enjoy' the film, but I did appreciate the artistry that went into it. ***
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Seeds of Yesterday (2015)
The latest, and final in the Lifetime Networks series of adaptions of V. C. Andrews novels that started with last years Flowers in the Attic. This fourth film is really the first one I've been disappointed with, I'm not sure they were just running out of steam or what the problem was, but though Seeds of Yesterday provided some closure, it also felt a little tacked on. I honestly think the thing I felt most lacking here was the presence of innocent characters, by which I mean children, yes there were Jory's babies, but they were just babies, didn't have a tone of character arc. It's the young confronting the awful that I think made the other films work, by this point everybody was just a little too old for that play. Anyway I'm glad I finished the series, but I think it may have peaked with the breakneck crazy of Petals on the Wind, thought the slow burn creepy of If There Be Thorns was effective as well. **
Thor: The Dark World (2013)
The second Thor movie, not counting The Avengers, its actually pretty good, I think I even liked more then most critics. I seldom read the Thor comics growing up, and I wouldn't think that this particular branch of the Marvel universe should hold much interest for me, but its just different enough, and done well enough, that I find it rather appealing. The plot, like many a Marvel movie, concerns menacing space villains that are all but interchangeable and really not that interesting, however they are really just there as a through line around which to wrap character development, cool sets, special effects, battle scenes, and some humor. This movie probably shouldn't have worked that well, there is really not much to it, and like a single comic book issue its kind of weak and pointless, but as part of an ongoing story, well if you get sucked in you get sucked in, and Marvel, against my better judgment, has got another sucker. ***
Altman (2014)
Documentary on the life and work of the famed writer/director Robert Altman (1925-2006). I liked it, I learned a good bit about him, including amusing stories of how he got into the film industry, went against orders to make a much respected episode of the TV series Combat!, and how Jack Warner fired him from a film project because he had characters talk over each other in an argument scene, the kind of thing that would later become an Altman trademark (the characters talking over each other, not the firing). The doc follows things in largely chronological order, we get segments on his more notable films and passing references to many of the others. Altman was a major player in starting the careers of some of our better character actors, a surprising number of them still working in the industry today. Altman certainly had an ability to gain the loyalty of the 'stock company' he created around himself, many of them working with him for decades. I can't say this about a lot of filmmakers, but I'd have liked to have known Robert Altman, he seems a very talented, idiocentric and human individual. ***
Sunday, April 12, 2015
If There Be Thornes (2015)
If There Be Thornes is the latest, until tonight, in the Lifetime Networks continuing adaptations of V. C. Andrews scandalous Dollanganger series, after Flowers in the Attack and Petals on the Wind. The film starts with Cathy and Chris nicely settled in California with her two children by two now (largely because of her) dead men. Things will not stay pleasant for long as the much despiseable Corrine Foxworth (played by Heather Graham again) is out of the nut house and set on "getting her family back". Corrine movies into the creepy old house next door to the Sheffield's and on the down low revels herself to her youngest grandson Bart (Mason Cook does a good job of being a creepy little brat here) who ironically is the child of her late husband. Anyway Corrine, but more so creepy butler John Amos (an equally creepy Mackenzie Gray) poisons Bart's mind until he become an angry, judgmental little creep, who again because context is kept from him causes a lot of problems and speeds along the plot. As with the other film in this series Thornes is high trash with a strong vain of camp, and resembles a rather twisted telenovela. In short I shouldn't like these movies but I do. **1/2
12 Years a Slave (2013)
Seeing 2013's best picture Oscar winner restores me to the statues of having seen each film to win in this category as I already saw Birdman in the theater. A true story 12 Years a Slave is based on Solomon Northup's 1853 memoir of the same title which was a major work in the abolitionist cannon and chronicles the dozen years its author, born a free black man in the north, spent as a slave in the south after having been abducted with the aid of men who claimed to be his friends. It's rough going for Solomon, and also for the audience, because like movies such as Schindler's List, 12 Years a Slave is about exposing its audience to a dark and unpleasant aspect of human history because its just important to know about such things and the viscerality of film is a great way to communicate them. It almost feels wrong to focus on anything but the story here but the cast is a strong one especially Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon and Michael Fassbender as a particularly vicious salve master, and of course Lupita Nyong'o won an Oscar for best supporting actress as Solomon's fellow slave Patsey. The films quite straight forward, what happened to Solomon was simply awful and this film communicates that well and I think will long serve as a convenient reference point for many people as to the reality of slave experience in pre- Civil War America. ****
Life of Pi (2012)
Ang Lee directed this film based on the 2001Canadian fantasy adventure novel of the same name by Yann Martel, which won the Booker Prize. Life of Pi is not the kind of book one might typically expect to be adapted to a big budget film, its structured kind of odd, and the protagonist is an Indian boy, and there are a lot of animals, and the boy becomes lost at sea with some of them, and one of them is a tiger. The film can be appreciated in a few ways, one of which is as a giant trick on the audience, but I'm going to avoid going into that in any detail save to say the film is kind of a mediation on story telling and the nature of truth. The movies got some great atypical visuals too it and (like the last film I reviewed Five Easy Pieces) it took it a while to get me, but it sure got me. Darned if I can think of another film like it. ***1/2
Friday, April 10, 2015
Five Easy Pieces (1970)
Bob Rafelson was the co-creator of The Monkees music group and TV show, as well as director of the groups 1968 feature film Head. Rafelson evidently wanted to do something quite different from what he'd been doing when he directed his 1970 film Five Easy Pieces, an impressively strong work for what was essentially a first feature, Head excepted. Five Easy Pieces also provided Rafelson with what would become a reputation as a 'one hit wonder' director, as he was never again able to achieve the critical and creative heights of this picture. The plot, which is lose and rambley and works because of that, concerns Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson, strong just as his career was taking off), the black sheep of an established and well respected family of classical musicians, who like many an anti-hero of his era just can't seem to cope with social constraint or obligations. Bobby 2 to 3 years previous to the start of the films narrative, just up and left his (presumably promising) career, home and family in Washington state and traveled to the California oil country were he got a job working on a well, and hooked up with a not-so-bright waitress played by Karen Black.
In course of the film Bobby discovers both that he has impregnated his girlfriend ( a pending source of responsibility he does not want), and that his father, with whom he's never gotten along, has suffered a series of strokes and may be dying back on Puget Sound. Bobby is convinced by his sister (Lois Smith) , the only member of his family he seems to be on good terms with, to travel home and visit his father in a last ditch effort to heal the past. Bobby reluctantly takes Rayette (Karen Black) with him and they have a series of misadventures on the road (including picking up some eccentric hitch-hikers) before arriving in Washington, where Bobby leaves Rayette at a hotel while he goes ahead to the island to scope out conditions there.
Bobby's return home is awkward, and becomes even akwarder when he takes a fancy to his brothers (Ralph Waite) lover and protégée (Susan Anspach) before a neglected feeling Rayette shows up. This is a film about relationships and also a character study of Bobby and thusly what plot and action there is in the film is there to facilitate that purpose. So there's not a lot else I can tell you about Five Easy Pieces because I don't want to spoil anything and you should probably see it yourself. It's certainly a product of its era but it also patches into larger themes that transcend time and place, and lets face it we all know someone kind of like Bobby. This movie took a little bit to get me, but it certainly got me, and I was impressed. ****
In course of the film Bobby discovers both that he has impregnated his girlfriend ( a pending source of responsibility he does not want), and that his father, with whom he's never gotten along, has suffered a series of strokes and may be dying back on Puget Sound. Bobby is convinced by his sister (Lois Smith) , the only member of his family he seems to be on good terms with, to travel home and visit his father in a last ditch effort to heal the past. Bobby reluctantly takes Rayette (Karen Black) with him and they have a series of misadventures on the road (including picking up some eccentric hitch-hikers) before arriving in Washington, where Bobby leaves Rayette at a hotel while he goes ahead to the island to scope out conditions there.
Bobby's return home is awkward, and becomes even akwarder when he takes a fancy to his brothers (Ralph Waite) lover and protégée (Susan Anspach) before a neglected feeling Rayette shows up. This is a film about relationships and also a character study of Bobby and thusly what plot and action there is in the film is there to facilitate that purpose. So there's not a lot else I can tell you about Five Easy Pieces because I don't want to spoil anything and you should probably see it yourself. It's certainly a product of its era but it also patches into larger themes that transcend time and place, and lets face it we all know someone kind of like Bobby. This movie took a little bit to get me, but it certainly got me, and I was impressed. ****
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
Maleficent (2014)
Having very much enjoyed both Enchanted and Into the Woods I was a bit surprised how truly bored I was by Maleficent. The Disney corporation is a consummate re-user of their existing properties and Maleficent, a kind of revisionist take on the villain from the classic 1959 animated movie Sleeping Beauty, was a box office hit that pretty much ensures that we will be seeing the regular release of live action Disney princess movies for years to come. Perhaps that was my problem, this movie was just not made for me, I am in no way its target audience. This picture doesn't so much subvert its genera conventions as it simply re-routes them. The films star is Angelina Jolie, perfectly cast as Maleficent, we get her sympathetic backstory, and see how the love she gains overtime for the princess she cursed (played age 15-16 by an also perfectly cast Elle Fanning) makes her a better person. By making the villain a kind of hero-turned villain- turned hero the movie attempts to fill the 'villain role' with the Scottish brogue of Sharlto Copley, whose really not an interesting character here. Visually there is a lot to look at, and I can approve of the basic story arc and updating of the stories moral to something more suitable for our time, but speaking for myself, there just wasn't anything here for me to grab onto. But I suppose that's as it should be, this is not a movie for me, this a movie for little girls who love princesses, and my eight year old niece adores it. For her I'm sure its four stars, but for me I'll merely give it **.
Hot Tube Time Machine 2 (2015)
Unnecessary and even cruder sequel to the 2010 sci-fi comedy Hot Tube Time Machine. I liked the original Hot Tube Time Machine, which I thought was oddly clever and more then a little bit sentimental, the sequel however is hurt most by the absence of the previous films star John Cusack, who was the heart of that film and gave it what grounding it had. Absent Cusack, as well as a point, this film is largely about gross out humor and how unpleasant an individual Rob Corddry can make his character. A few mildly clever moments, and Gillian Jacobs not withstanding, this is a bad film which earns its 15% fresh rating on rottentomatos.com. *1/2
Memories of Murder (2003)
Korean language crime-drama set in the rural South Korea of the mid 1980's. The story concerns a group of cops, sometimes at odds, as they attempt to solve a series of rap murders of young girls in the country side. The film is actually based on the real life Hwaseong serial murders which occurred from 1986 to 1991 and were never solved. The film has got an excellent sense of mode and foreboding, is crispy shot with a few visually memorable sequences, is well cast, and really gives one a sense of rural Korean life at that time, aided through the use of pop music, television programs, and real life events from the period. I found the film evoked a vocal reaction from me a couple of times, most prominently when a potential witness is unexpectedly killed in a tragic fashion. This is strong movie making, and I think only the second South Korean film I've ever seen (after Save the Green Planet, also a 2003 release). Worth a look. ***
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